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Kanban Boards and Design Thinking: A Powerful Duo for Product Development07 Nov 2024

In the customer-centric world, effective product development relies on the ability to quickly understand customer needs, prototype solutions, and continuously improve products. That is where the concept of Design Thinking and the Kanban board practice - two seemingly distinct work methods - complement each other exceptionally well. While Design Thinking helps teams empathize with users and ideate solutions, Kanban offers a structured, highly visual way to manage these ideas and turn them into reality. Together, they create a workflow that’s both customer-focused and efficient.

In this article, we’ll explore how Kanban boards can support each stage of your Design Thinking process using a sample project and provide tips on optimizing this synergy for improved product development and customer satisfaction.

Design Thinking and Kanban basics

The Design Thinking approach to product development emphasizes understanding users by defining their needs, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. This iterative process encourages empathy, creativity, and experimentation.

Kanban is a visual workflow management tool for tracking task moves through consecutive process stages, allowing teams to visualize, prioritize, and continuously improve their flow. Originating from lean manufacturing, Kanban promotes transparency, actively limits work in progress (WIP), and enhances workflow efficiency.

As you can see, while Design Thinking guides what needs doing, Kanban shows how to do it in a manageable, transparent way. Through a combination of these approaches, a team can both understand customer needs and deliver quality solutions.

Kanban and Design Thinking: A step-by-step example

Our example team was tasked with developing a new feature for an existing e-commerce platform application to improve the checkout process. Let's follow each stage of a possible Design Thinking process and see what its complimentary Kanban board might look and work like.

• Empathize: stepping into the user's shoes
  The team conducts user interviews and surveys, analyzing user journey data to understand the user experience, pain points, and desires. As tasks move through the Empathize stage columns, the team gathers insights into the users' specific frustrations, such as lengthy checkout times, limited payment options, or lost cart items upon page refreshing. Key points are then documented and placed in the Insights column, serving as a foundation for the next step.
• Define: naming the problem
  In this stage, the team synthesizes their findings to identify a clear, user-focused problem statement, finally placing it in the Validated Problem column, distinctly defining the focus for the Ideate phase.
• Ideate: generating ideas
  In this brainstorming phase, the team proposes potential solutions to address the defined problem. Creativity flows freely as the team explores ideas for a faster, more user-friendly checkout experience, until the most promising options are selected, readying the team for prototyping.
• Prototype: creating solutions
  At this stage, the team can create low-fidelity models of their shortlisted ideas to test and quickly gather initial feedback.
• Test: validating the solution
  In the final Design Thinking phase of the flow, the team tests their prototypes with real-life product users, refining the solution based on their feedback until it meets user needs. After several iterations based on user feedback, the feature is ready to be developed for full-scale deployment.
• Deploy: implmenting the solution
  This process stage follows a standard software development workflow with requirements gathering, coding, testing, and reviewing the applied solutions before releasing them to the live product.
• Feedback: staying open to user comments
  It would be naive to think that your product changes will meet nothing but praise. For your product's success and longevity on the market, the team should always keep their ears peeled for user comments, feedback, and suggestions. A Kanban-based product journey is never done, with continued improvements being part and parcel of the method.

Tips for using Design Thinking in combination with a Kanban board

Prioritize WIP Limits: Assigning a WIP limit to each column prevents the team from taking on too many tasks simultaneously, ensuring focus and reducing bottlenecks - speeding up the process overall.

Color-code task types: Give different colors to various kinds of tasks (e.g., research, prototyping, feedback), making it easy to track tasks at a single glance.

Regularly review and refine the board layout: With the project evolution, some columns or tasks may need adjustments. Regular reviews help keep the board relevant and effective.

Document insights right on the board: Capture important insights directly on the Kanban board, incorporating them into the flow. It will make information easily accessible and ensure mindset and process alignment across the team.

Summing up

Combining Kanban with Design Thinking is a powerful approach to product development. Design Thinking emphasizes empathy and creative problem-solving, while Kanban ensures the team is well organized, with a visualization of each stage allowing them to drive actionable progress. This combination enables teams to create innovative, customer-focused solutions and deliver them in a structured, predictable manner.

Using Kanban boards as companions to Design Thinking transforms abstract ideas into clear, actionable steps, helping teams meet user needs and ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Whether designing a new product, refining an existing feature, or addressing a unique user pain point, the marriage of Kanban and Design Thinking offers a dynamic pathway to successful, user-centered innovation.